This invention relates to the field of electronic design automation, and more specifically, to the optimization of digital circuits whose design is based on cell libraries.
Integrated circuits are important building blocks of the information age and are critical to the information age, affecting every industry including financial, banking, legal, military, high technology, transportation, telephony, oil, medical, drug, food, agriculture, education, and many others. Integrated circuits such as DSPs, amplifiers, DRAMs, SRAMs, EPROMs, EEPROMs, Flash memories, microprocessors, ASICs, and programmable logic are used in many applications such as computers, networking, telecommunications, and consumer electronics.
Consumers continue to demand greater performance in their electronic products. For example, higher speed computers will provide higher speed graphics for multimedia applications or development. Higher speed Internet web servers will lead to greater on-line commerce including on-line stock trading, book sales, auctions, and grocery shopping, just to name a few examples. Higher performance integrated circuits will improve the performance of the products in which they are incorporated.
Large modern day integrated circuits have millions of devices including gates and transistors and are very complex. As process technology improves, more and more devices may be fabricated on a single integrated circuit, so integrated circuits will continue to become even more complex with time. To meet the challenges of building more complex and higher performance integrated circuits, software tools are used. These tools are in an area referred to as computer aided design (CAD), computer aided engineering (CAE), or electronic design automation (EDA). There is a constant need to improve these electronic automatic tools in order to address the desire for higher integration and better performance in integrated circuits.
Therefore, there is a need for improved techniques for electronic design automation.